Category: 4: Portrait

Andrew Salgado is a Canadian artist who works in London and has exhibited his work around the world. His paintings are large-scale works of portraiture that incorporate elements of abstraction and symbolic meaning.

Frida Kahlo de Rivera ( 1907 – July 13, 1954) was a Mexican artist. She used a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society.

Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. She was disabled by polio as a child. Then at age eighteen a traffic accident caused lifelong pain and medical problems. It was during her recovery that she decided to leave her earlier ambitions to study medicine and become an artist.

In 1927, she joined the Mexican Communist Party. Here she met the muralist Diego Rivera and they married in 1928. The relationship was volatile and included a year-long divorce; both had extramarital affairs. Throughout her life Kahlo was mainly known as Rivera’s wife. From the 1930s Kahlo’s always fragile health began to decline. She had her first and only solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, shortly before her death in 1954 at the age of 47.

In the late 1970s her work was rediscovered by art historians and political activists. Kahlo’s work has been celebrated by feminists for what is seen as its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form. By the early 1990s, she had become not only a recognized figure in art history and the Feminism movement, but also an icon for Chicanos and the LGBTQ movement.

Rembrandt (1606-1669) was a Dutch painter, draughtsman and printmaker. His works cover a wide range of style and subject matter, from portraits and self-portraits to landscapes, genre scenes, allegorical and historical scenes, biblical and mythological themes as well as animal studies.

Rembrandt’s fame while he lived was greater as an etcher than as a painter (he did no engravings or woodcuts). He experimented with different etching and drypoint techniques. He used different mark-making tools to create different types of line – in contrast to the much more mechanical engraving techniques. Rembrandt sometimes employed even the V-shaped engraver’s burin in his etchings, combining it with the fine etching needle and thicker dry point needle, as in the work opposite, for richer pictorial effects.

Rembrandt Old Bearded ManRembrandt with Saskia etchingRembrandt Mother in Widow’s Dress and Black GlovesRembrandt The Three Trees Etching and Drypoint

He also experimented with different inking variations for chiaroscuro, producing very different interpretations of the same plate. Etching allows a lot of correction and burnishing to change the image. In some instances his etching were explorations of light and shade that he then transferred into his paintings.

Rembrandt The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds, 1634, etching, engraving and drypoint printed in black ink on cream paper.

We do with our lives what we can. And then we die. What else is there?

If anything ever does work in my case chance, and what I call ‘accident’ takes over.

Gamble everything on the next brush stroke…different strokes trying to do something else then develop themselves

How are you going to trap reality? How are you going to trap an appearance without making an illustration of it?

Colour of meat is beautiful

Issues for my printmaking:

Feeling the form as it emerges – particularly with monoprint or inking collagraph plates. One thing can turn into another.

Can work from photographs for portraits. But observe – Bacon could not draw.

Shadows do not need to relate to a subject – making them different can create considerable tension

his tryptichs ‘don’t relate to each other, but they play off one another…the balance seems better with three’

Key images

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion c.1944 The work’s exhibition in April 1945 coincided with the release of the first photographs and film footage of the Nazi concentration camps. (Tate Modern website)Triptych August 1972. This work is generally considered one in a series of Black Triptychs which followed the suicide of Bacon’s lover, George Dyer. Dyer appears on the left and Bacon is on the right. The central group is derived from a photograph of wrestlers by Edward Muybridge, but also suggests a more sexual encounter. The seated figures and their coupling are set against black voids and the central flurry has been seen as ‘a life-and death struggle’. (Tate Modern website)Study for a self-portrait. Also known as Businessman I 1952 or Man’s Head 1952

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Jenny Saville’s extremely tactile approach to painting women’s bodies, including her own, as a feminist critique of the way the female nude has been portrayed by the male art establishment has influenced my work in:

Assignment 2: The Human Condition 2: Flesh Here my focus is on the tactility of the body and ways in which different types of paper eg wrinkled blotting paper or tracing paper give different body textures. As well as meanings of different shapes.

Key points for my printmaking:

Some of her paintings use text – following the example of feminist photographers like Jo Spence

Mixing red and cyan on flesh creates tension because we do not know how to read it.

Body as narrative of traces, a copperplate to be etched on – possibilities for over-printing

Cut out the shape of a body and draw around and over it, then remove the mask. Keep going till you have something believable.

Videos

Jenny Saville discussing her painting process in 2018 in relation to the All Too Human exhibition at Tate Britain. This is a detailed discussion of her working process and evolution as an artist. She is interested in:

Relationship between ‘how you are’ and ‘how you are seen’ eg in work on plastic surgery, people saw themselves as ill because they did not have the nose or breasts they wanted. They saw surgery as enabling them to be their ‘real self’.

Paint as vocabulary and anatomy of paint traces from Pollock and de Kooning and document of the process of making

Earlier interview with Jenny Saville, focussing particularly on her recent work with its interest in time and traces, multiple figures and memory.

Aleppo

in exhibition ‘All Too Human’ pieta of people carrying bodies out from war zones. she used lots of photographs of a woman in burqa and lots of bodies.

Jenny Saville Aleppo

“I have been working on Pietas [depictions of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Christ] quite a bit, and a series of children being carried.

“Over 20 years I have collecting images of babies being carried out of bombings, war situations, in Pieta poses knowing that one day I will do a piece, so this work has been a long time in the making.

“Aleppo is the first one I have released like it.

“I have done paintings linked to war before, but not linked to a political situation – I have endless images from the internet, or from newspapers, of babies that have been killed in these bombings, and when I finished the piece, I have two children myself, how long will it be before we as humans know not to do this?

“When I was titling it, I thought I would link it – for the first time – to what is going on in Syria.

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O’Donoghue was born in England but lived and worked for many years in County Kerry, Ireland. He graduated from Goldsmiths in 1982 and was Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London from 1984-85.

His work is characterised by an engagement with the past. He uses figuration and abstraction to explore themes of human identity, memory, remembering and experience; and draws on history, mythology and personal records to create works which resonate with emotional intensity.

His printmaking includes very large carborundum plates of figures. He mixes fine grain carborundum, acrylic paste and black acrylic paint. He paints this on the plate with a thick brush, wiping off and reworking the image on the plate before it dries. This makes a complex, multi-layered texture. He often uses aluminium plates. Prints on thick Arches paper.